So I gave in

On a last note, I gave in and did the whole Facebook thing. I never wanted one just because then I have to maintain it and keep up contact with all these people. And they do they whole give virtual hugs and plants and that’s plain freaky. But I have a lot of friends already even though it’s only been a week. Though it has backfired with my aunt being my friend. Though I can now give her annoying virtual hugs which she will love. Aww I can hug you now Sussie.

So mother, if you wish to make a facebook go for it. For it will be another means for you to stalk me. So, if you have a facebook I have one too so add me as a friend cause then it looks like I’m not a lonely little person. I do have real, very good friends. They’re just either way too cool or not with it and so they don’t have facebook.

Me, in Venice in a gondola wearing my Venician mask. It’s blue. Very pretty. Mailing it home now so hoping it doesn’t break. Or break customs.

Happy Birthday

 

 

Pip,

Happy 14th birthday dude. Celebrate it. Sorry my present is late. I send you these clips with love. Remember them? I can’t actually find a movie with just the one line so have fun with these two.

 

Love you little (emphasis) brother. xx

 

Eurotrip

I’m sorry. I’m a terrible daughter, grandaughter, niece.

I went away for several weeks and before that I had the stress of my host family. Not the best family ever and I was just too stressed and then I finally changed again and left. So, if you still like me enough to want to hear, I went on Eurotour. That’s one of the reasons why I haven’t posted as much. Eurotour was pretty absolutely amazing. Something I will never forget.

It went from the 3rd of June to the 14th. The first day was spent in Paris. I had to catch a train at seven to be there at nine. To then have one other exchange student be an hour late. So when we finally got to the bus we had made all fifty other students be delayed by two hours. So I didn’t have to get up at five that day anyway. Spent the day in Paris and took a bus tour getting off at the main landmarks. I felt so sorry for our tour guide as people were just starting to walk up and get to know each other. Though, I wasn’t actually looking as to who our tour guide was. I was just listening and looking at the things he was pointing out. Then I looked up and said ‘Oh my, the guide is actually a man!’. The guy sitting beside me has spun around to look at the guide and then we spent the rest of the tour laughing, just because he sounded exactly as if he was a 15 year old girl. We spent the night in Reims. And truth be told we did nothing that night. We all went to bed. We just told people that we stayed up the whole time.

Day two we were in Strasbourg. I had gone here before with my host mother. This time however we did a tour of the canals. It was really pretty. And loud. You have to understand that the whole time we did all the touristy things that we payed for, we were talking absolute crap to each other while listening. We stayed the night in Strasbourg. The hotel threw us a disco which was a nice thought. We had a girly get dressed up night. A lot of posing in the mirror with cameras.

Day three we crossed the border to Germany. You just cross a river. Every different country we went to, we knew we had crossed the border because everyones phone would receive a message that detailed how our service worked in that country. Austria was the best though because the message actually just said ‘Welcome to Austria’. In Germany we went to Munich. Very pretty city. A lot of exchange students were going on about how they wished they had gone to Germany instead. But I like France better I think. Germany was very square. We stayed the night in the mountains above Munich. We never hostled it, just not very expensive hotels. We only had one night where we had to share a room with eight other girls. There were always showers in the rooms though. I hate your communal shower. For every night starting from Italy I was with four other girls. We were together for Eurotrip. That night in Munich we played Ultimate Frisbee in the pouring rain and so, the mud. It was actually really fun. Except, someone decided to cheat, and simply pushed me into the mud so I didn’t score. Someone then himself in turn got pushed into the mud and sat on.

The next day we visited the castle of Linderhoff. It’s German. It’s very French obsessed with Versailles and the Sun King. We didn’t say anything about it. The guide insisted that the person who made the castle just admired the French cause it was built 150 years after the Sun King died. We then went to Austria, Innsbruck. I had ‘The sound of music’ going through my head. The churches here, were very high arched with lots of pale pink and gold. But very small and dense. It poured here too and I bought a t-shirt that says ‘No kangaroos in Austria’. I had to. It was in the shape of a Kangaroo road sign too. I got the patch for my jacket too.

The next day we went to Italy. I loved Italy and I really should be Italian. I had a lot of people come up and just start talking Italian to me. One day I will live in Venice. First we spent the day in Verona. We visited Romeo and Juilet’s house and I signed the wall. There are signatures all over the walls of their house. It is literally layers of ink. I lost my signature right after I did it. The boys signed the wall ‘dictation’ as we had just finished watching Summer Heights High on the bus. I spent the day shopping for discount sunnies and fake wallets and such while eating ice cream and pizza. Though a bunch of Italian boys came up and told us that the pizza we had bought wasn’t real Italian pizza becuase the crust was too thick. They did then offer us to come back to their mothers place to get us real pizza. How nice of them. We stayed in a little beach town that was just below Venice. We stayed there for two nights. It was my favourite place there. That night we went to an Italian discothèque. We were the majority of the people in there.  That night I was on the balcony. Just below and diagonal our balcony was the boys room balcony. So I spent the night on the balcony talking. So I was very tired for Venice.

Venice was the next day. It was beautiful and amazing. It is my dream city and I’m so glad I got to go. We got ice cream from a back alley, we went to the Ferrari store, the Dolce and Gabanna shop, went on a gondola ride where the man sang for us and then gave one of the girls his hat. We posed, we all wore dresses and sunnies and guarded our bags. We got to haggle with the vendors as they gasped at the prices we offered to buy their wares at. We were hounded by people to buy their fake bags, wallets and sunnies.

The next day we drove the entire day. We stopped for lunch at a little village called ‘ville de luc’ -’Village by the lake’. It had the turquoise water and cobblestones. Very pretty but wouldn’t be able to live there. We arrived that night in San Remo. We didn’t tour it just slept there. The European soccer cup was on and our hotel was next door to a bar. So no one was allowed outside that night because Italy lost their soccer match.

The next day was one of my friends 18th birthday. We started off the day in Italy, went to Monaco for lunch and a tour and then finished back in France in Orange. Three countries in a day. I have a photo where I could see three countries within one tiny landscape. How cool. Monaco is beautiful and very strict. I saw the race track with sport cars all over the place. Very, very rich sporty beautiful cars there. I wasn’t allowed in to see the Cathedral at Monaco because that day I was wearing a shirt that didn’t have sleeves. And women aren’t allowed into the Cathedral unless they are appropriately covered. Yes… You’re also not allowed to have your shoes off at anytime in Monaco. That must be hard to enforce with the children who live there. After Monaco that afternoon we drove to Frejus for the night.  We gave our friend a fruit platter as a birthday cake that night. She likes fruit more than cake. We went to the beach that night but apparently it was in the rules (though none of us could find it) that we weren’t allowed to swim. So the tour leaders said we couldn’t swim but we were allowed to sit in the water.

The next day we took a boat tour of Cassis. It’s a beautiful little beach town with these beautiful white cliffs and clear water. It is the type of dream beach town I would love to live at. For the afternoon we went to Marseille.  We did the Cathedral and a tour of which most of the people at the back fell asleep. It had been a long day and night last night.  Our tour leader at Orange, the next French town we went to that afternoon, actually gave up talking to us. He was pointing at something and then just went ‘and this is.. oh forget it’ and walked off. That night the girls did the traditional give the boys make overs. For some reason it’s harder to talk to the boys when they’re wearing your eyeliner and their lashes have volume. None of the girls gave the boys their make up remover or nail polish remover either. It was more fun. We had to help them in the morning though because they were just enjoying the make up too much and we got freaked out.

The next day we went to Lyon, France. We had a picnic on the bank of the canal as the other girls bought bread, cheese and sundried tomatos. I just bought myself a quiche that had no cheese in. We had a two hour walking tour of Lyon that I don’t remember a lot of as I was exhausted that day and there was no coffee that morning at breakfast. I’m a coffee addict now. Just in the morning. But it has to be with a lot of sugar. We spent the night in a hotel on the French Alps. The girls decided that this night they would have make overs. Cause we were feeling pretty ugly next to all the pretty boys last night. So we attacked each other with make up that took me hours to get off.

The next day we went to Switzerland. This was the only place we got stopped at because Switzerland isn’t a part of Europe United so they don’t take part in the open border policy. We went to Geneva and visited the UN. If you’re pregnant you’re not allowed into the UN because if your baby is born there, then they have over 180 nationalities because UN is neutral. So essentially I was in Australia again for two hours. We then went chocolate and Swiss army knife shopping. I had to laugh when one of my friends asked me my opinion on the knife he just bought. I said ‘All the street cred. you bought with the knife is lost as to how your nail polish is still sparkly’. I didn’t eat the Swiss chocolate until I got home because it was a present for host family. That was self control. We went back to France then to stay the night in Dijon. This was our last night together. So there was a big disco downstairs where we all partied it up. We didn’t get to bed til about 3. Others stayed up the whole night but I feared for the others safety if I didn’t sleep a little. The final day was on the bus where everyone was signing everyone elses bookor flag or giant inflatable turtle.

When I got off the bus at my train station the other exchange students who I had become really good friends with cheated and started crying. I didn’t cry but I teared up. I got really close to these girls and boys. They were so familiar and comfortable to me by the end of the trip. Doing a Eurotrip in this fashion only happens to a select few people. And I loved it. So thank you parents. I will give you photos in another post sorry for I fear this one is too big already.

I send you all lots of love to butter you up because I’m going away again this week. I’m going to Bordeaux until Wednesday when I’ll post photos and catch everything up that I haven’t posted about.

Lucky I know how to speak Rachel

Go out into this world and give all you have to give because you got a lot. And now that you’re 18 and oh so old, I hope you had a fabulous day.

Happy birthday to you

You’re a hundred and two

You look like a monkey

And you smell like your shoe.

 

Marseille

I went to Marseille with my host mother last week. We went down on the train on a Wednesday for four hours in first class because my host mother only travels first class. She was going down for work and so I was given money every morning to take a taxi around Marseille and enjoy the town as I saw fit during the day.

I absolutely loved Marseille. It was all white and gorgeous and the little idyllic beach town you have imagined just on a grand scale with industry also. I did get called a beautiful goddess in Italian too, but I’m pretty sure that the vendor was saying that to get me to stop and buy his fish. Marseille stinks of fish around the port.

On the first day I decided to walk to the centre ville and find the tourism office. I have a good sense of orientation through my memory. I can remember landmarks, or routes on a map. So I had seen a map and had an inclination of which direction to go in from my hotel. So I followed the road on the right side of my hotel and after going down several roads I found the centre ville. I was so proud that I had managed to find it and my way back. I was going on about how amazing I was and I was so talented. I had come back to my hotel at 6 to deposit my shopping because my arms were hurting. My host mother was meeting me at eight so I decided to go walking on the left side of my hotel to see what I could for a while. So off I went and just down the road was the centre ville. I couldn’t believe it. I had walked so far in the morning. I was so cranky and laughing so hard. I had had several coffees that day so that was also a factor.

When I was in a resturant for dinner there was a couple behind me speaking English. I was just half listening because they obviously thought that they were ok to speak English and not be understood, but I just knew their accents. So I said to my host mum ‘I’m positive that they are Australian.’ The man spoke with the same accent as you grandad. They were Australian and their daughter apparently lives in Townsville. Small world. They were doing their over 60s tour of Europe. Bet their daughter didn’t get them the over 40s Europe tour book for Christmas and so they had to wait another 20 years.

I bought awesome shoes in Marseille. I was having a competition with Alana and sending back and forth photos of the shoes we had bought. Stop buying shoes Lana. I’ll post the shoes tomorrow mum. WIth all of the ones I’ve bought.

View of the Marseille port.

View of Marseille centre ville and main street and boutiques.

 

View of Marseille

Not too sure if this is the Marseille soccer team but felt I needed a picture of someone playing soccer in Marseille.

The inside of the Notre-Dame-De-La-Garde. It is all gold mosiac and illuminated.

It was in Marseille that I saw my first poppy. They were everywhere just growning out of the rocks. It was raining the whole time I was in Marseille. My new shoes were ruined. That was a different pair to the ones I bought in Marseille though.

It’s apparently illegal to call a koala Skippy

My parents sent me a giant bag full of little koalas to give to people as presents. You know the whole ‘Hey I’m Australian. Have something Australian that was made in china.’ It’s part of the exchange. You give out little things that are specific for your country.

I gave one to each of my host siblings. My eldest host brother decided to decorate his. He came running into my room with wash out hair spray, paper, glue, scissors and various knickknacks. I thought he got banned from doing something in his room and so was doing it in mine. He then explained he was just decorating his koala. I just continued doing what I was doing on the computer. Then he put this in front of me.

This is Smokey. I did suggest Skippy but got in trouble for that. I’m a terrible Aussie. Smokey has been sprayed yellow, red, purple and blue. He’s been given a keyring for an earring, has another giant Australian flag, on the back has a pin of a guitar, has sunnies glued to his face, his hat has been turned and glued backwards and for the final touch he has a cigarette that is bigger than he is. I think the cigarette makes him a little French but it certainly would explain why koalas always have those red, bloodshot eyes.

Of course after my brother did this he left a huge mess on my bed from where he had been ‘fixing’ Smokey.

Not rubbing it in, just telling you my calender

So tomorrow I’m going away with my host mother to Marseille. It was that or school. Speaking of school, I arrived today and had three tests in a row. I did the Maths one. The others I went through and translated for my teachers. I did have a three hour lunch break of which I bought new shoes. Very cheap, pretty black heels.

So I have three months of summer holidays. From June this is my schedule:

In June, Eurobustrip. The third to the fourteenth. Freakin’ awesome.

End of June my elder host brothers have invited me to go to London with them for a weekend after they have finished all their school exams. They want me to translate, but I’ll be having too much fun. And I can’t talk French in England. People won’t realise I’m not French. I’m really Australian. I have to speak English around people who also speak English in France. Just so they realise I’m not French. I speak the same language. Please let me speak English for just a couple of minutes.

End of June, start of July I’ve been invited to Bordeaux by friends of my first host family. They just met me and invited me down. How amazingly generous is that?

July the fourteenth I’m going with the campervan again to Bretagne which is the most eastern providence of France, closest to England.  

Then, this is the Eurotrip I have planned with my friend. She is also on exchange in Swizterland but with a different program. She’s in the German part and arrived six weeks after I did. So it’s good for me because I can say ‘Oh this happened’ and she can go ‘And you felt like this’. Or now she can say to me ‘Hey I just arrived at this phase of the exchange’ and I can say ‘Oh that’s normal don’t worry, soon this will happen’. So August 2nd she will come to France and live with my host family also. We will spend a couple of days in Paris with  a day trip to London. Then for the weekend, 8th to the 10th, we will catch a train to Belgium, Brussels. Then on the 10th we will go down to Swiss and I will spend time with her family with a day trip to Italy. This is the plan. We’re still working on getting permission and tickets, but we worked out what we want to do and the dates. That’s the most important. I’m so excited. It’s not just that it’s with one of my best friends. It’s the fact that it’s something we planned to do because it’s where we want to go. It’s my first overseas trip I planned for myself. And I’m hopefully going to go to five different countries. So parents, thanks.

And today I found out that my grandparents are coming to Paris on September 25th. So give me all the details andI’ll see what I can do with you. Parentals do you have a date set yet?

I’m very glad my parcel finally arrived. I was getting worried. Hope you all liked your presents and I did a good job picking them. I will post the next one soon. I have too many people to give presents to for them to all fit in one sorry.

Because it’s spring these flowers are everywhere just growing in the grass. I love it. Everyone else is going around complaining cause they have to poison the weeds. It’s a good thing I got photos of them when I did because the day after they were poisoned out of the grass.

 

Cause you all know you want to see me. I’m happy. Normally when I edit them my eyes go black. My eyes aren’t really black. But you can see my real eye colour in this one even after I edited it. Cool.

I’m going away til Friday. I should be able to talk to you all on the weekend.

Happy Mother’s Day

So I did send my Mother’s Day present but I don’t think it has arrived yet. Oh the big photo of me in the Mother’s Day post? It’s not conceited. It’s acknowledgement that I look like my mother. I was fiddling around with this photo because my flash went spastic and made it too bright and I stopped here because I really do look like my mother there. I never could see that I look like my mother.

So… Happy Mother’s Day. Cross your fingers that France Mail has not lost your present.

Chantilly

 

Chantilly is a hunting castle. It’s beautiful and it’s for horses. I’ve never been a big fan of horses just because I’ve never been around them I guess. But even that whole girl phase of ‘I love horses’ I never went through. I went here with my host father from my first family the day I returned to their house. It was fun and gorgeous and just starting to be hot then. Right now it’s hot. It’s finally coming into spring, proper hot spring not just that the flowers all come out. This castle is situated on huge grounds. This was the first castle that I visited that actually had a giant crowd there. People come all over just to play soccer in the yard or have a picnic. They had very good waffles here. But covered with chantilly which is french for whipped cream. So I just had to have it without whipped cream and with sugar instead.  

Vendee

So there is a lot of places that I’ve visited over my past fifteen weeks now. I’m just going to spend a week updating everyone on where I’ve gone. This is Vendee. I went here with Rotary. It was a exchange weekend for all of the exchange students in France. It was an advertisement for peace. Look see all these young children from different countries can get along so everyone else can. It was surprisingly fun. I went for four days. My host sister from my fourth family came with me. She was one of four French students who were there. For the peace we marched through the freezing ocean. We were going on a peace walk and the Rotarians forgot to count the tide into their plans so we had to wait for it to go down. Eventually they just gave up and made us walk along the road still flooded by the ocean. It was so so so cold. But once you were in the water your feet went numb so it didn’t hurt as much. When I got out of the water the South African student and I ran back in so our feet could renumbify and stop hurting. We made a giant sand sculpture for peace where everyone made a face. We each laid a tile for a peace mural that had Rotary’s emblem on. We each had to perform a skit from our country in a talent show other people actually paid to be at. An Australian girl got up and called out ‘Aussie’s where the bloody hell are ya?’ and so I was pushed on stage. We sang Waltzing Matilda, I Still Call Australia Home and Give Me A Home Among The Gumtrees. No one had actually planned Australia’s skit. We just got up and someone would start singing and all would join in. I was the one who was given the microphone so I just held it up to someone else. I had no sleep that weekend. When you go on a Rotary weekend you set your expectations at that you’re going to be sleeping in a old warehouse building. So it was brilliant when we arrived at an actually camping park and we each got a cabin for four. Ours didn’t have hot water though but that wasn’t too disappointing because the fact we had electricity was keeping us all very happy.

All of the Australian exchange students in France. The only other one in my Australian district is Melinda who is in front of me in a white coat. Lloyd is the student in my French district. He lives in Perth. Hes the first boy on the left at the back with blond hair.

Some of the students from my French districts. We are about to go walking through the freezing ocean. We are all wearing a white shirt that says Rotary, pour la paix. It was our district that started the trend of wearing the shirts over the top of your giant coat. Made you feel very fat but jeez did we look cool. It was hilarious to try and get those shirts off afterwards though. Everyone had to go and help everybody else.

 

Vendee’s Beach. It’s pretty. I’m quite impressed as to how this photo turned out. It was at Vendee that I broke my camera. I dropped it in the sand and sand got stuck all through the lens so it doesn’t open and close very well now. It does if you shake it. I just took photos for my brother and managed to drop my camera then. Sorry mum. I backed up all my photos today too. I burned about nine CDs. I will send them home soon with my next parcel. Did it arrive yet?

On a random note I would like to include a whinge. I’m that kind of person who likes to keep text messages. And after I go through them every now and then. I still have messages on my Australian mobile (cause I have an Australian one and a French one now) from a year ago. Just because I liked the message. So my French phone apparently only holds 250 messages. My inbox is full. My phone is cranky at me because its trying to receive another message. So I’m sorry whoever texted me. I haven’t replied because I don’t want to delete messages to free up space for your message. And when I do delete messages it had better be the holy grail of messages that contains the freakin’ meaning of life.

I have a day off tomorrow from school. It is the day that the World War stopped for France so they have a national holiday. Unfortunetly my family will be studying for their end of year exams so I think I will take the day to keep reading my French book. If all the other kids are studying then there will be no one to watch me look up every second word in the dictionary.

Mother, tell me when my package arrives. Thank you for my jacket too. It was hot today. I was only in a short sleeved shirt. Apparently it was 28 degrees but it didn’t feel like it at all. I would have said maybe 24 degrees. We had a BBQ. The BBQ’s here are smoke BBQs. The literally build a fire and then stick meat over the top. I don’t know how to explain how Australian’s BBQ. Just going to go with we grill things with beer.